Meet me at EI

The IS&T/SPIE  19^th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology in San Jose is taking place from 28 January to 1 February 2007. You can find all the information you need at http://www.electronicimaging.org/. I will present two papers, one on digital publishing and one on psychophysics experiments.

The first paper will be in the Color Imaging XII: Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications conference Wednesday 31 January at 10:40 am in Convention Center Room A2. Titled Adaptive color artwork, a pre-print is available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2006/HPL-2006-186.html. Here is the abstract: The words in a document are often supported, illustrated, and enriched by visuals. When color is used, some of it is used to define the document’s identity and is therefore strictly controlled in the design process. The result of this design process is a “color specification sheet,” which must be created for every background color. While in traditional publishing there are only a few backgrounds, in variable data publishing a larger number of backgrounds can be used. We present an algorithm that nudges the colors in a visual to be distinct from a background while preserving the visual’s general color character.

The second paper will be in the Image Quality and System Performance IV conference Wednesday 31 January at 1:35 pm in Convention Center Room C2. Titled Web-based versus controlled-environment psychophysics experiments, it is a collaboration with the University of Milano-Bicocca and the pre-print is available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2006/HPL-2006-187.html. Here is the abstract: A recent trend in psychophysics experiments related to image quality is to perform the experiments on the World Wide Web with a large number of observers instead of in a laboratory under controlled conditions. This method assumes that the large number of participants involved in a Web investigation “averages out” the parameters that the experiments would require to keep fixed in the same experiment performed, following a traditional approach, under controlled conditions. In this paper we present the results of two experiments we have conducted to assess the minimum value of color contrast to ensure readability. The first experiment was performed in a controlled environment, the second on the Web. The result emerging from the statistical data analysis is that the Web experiment yields the same conclusions as the experiment done in the laboratory.